Entrepreneurs make Serious Impact at Venturefest East

Allia were excited to deliver the ‘Meet the Future’ track session at Venturefest East last week, offering 6 inspiring entrepreneurs the chance to share how they make impact.

Six of the brightest and best impact entrepreneurs pitched for the audience vote and the chance to win the title “Impact Entrepreneur 2017″ at this year’s VentureFest East on Thursday 21st September at Newmarket Racecourse.

Introduced by Peter Cowley, named Best Angel of the World by the World Business Angel Investment Forum in February 2017, the event showcased the best and brightest ‘Impact Entrepreneurs’ from the East of England.

Pitches were followed by a dynamic Q&A session, before the audience, a combination of entrepreneurs, investors and local enterprise support services, were asked to vote in a ‘Run-around’ style, standing next to the venture they wanted to see win.

The businesses were from a range of sectors, including medtech, bionics, agritech and smartcities, each supported through Allia’s Serious Impact programme, which is currently delivered in Peterborough, Cambridge and East London.

Peter Cowley, ‘Best Angel of the World’, presents Will Jackson with his prize, 3D printed at Allia’s Innovation Lab in Peterborough.

The winning pitch was delivered by Will Jackson, of Playphysio, who provides gaming solutions that transform the daily physiotherapy routines of children suffering with respiratory conditions from sources of conflict into fun and engaging experiences, with better health outcomes. .

Other pitchers included:

Sensize – Sensize is building a system to connect, track and monitor objects in the supply chain. Better tracking of shipments will reduce the fuel used to transport goods. At the moment, up to 25% of all wood harvested in the US and Europe is used to make disposable shipping pallets. Our technology will allow companies to find, manage and re-use shipping pallets. This will eliminate a lot of waste.

Agrosight – a data analytics company that specialises in analysing crop-specific data. They have developed a proprietary dataset and various algorithms that function as benchmark and training datasets, setting data standards for collection and enabling the detection of plant stressors at early stages.

Cambridge Bio-augmentation Systems – Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems is working on technologies to improve the connections between prosthetics and the human body. Imagine a prosthetic device that operated as simply as a USB connection. Yeah, Six Million Dollar Man becomes reality.

Corrosion RADAR – CorrosionRADAR, a spin-out of Cranfield University UK and a small company from the oil and gas supply chain, strives to be a global leader in remote sensing technologies and advanced analytics systems for smart infrastructures. Monitoring the Corrosion and Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI) that can cause catastrophic failures and major downtime for the Oil & Gas sector, are the main focus of the company.

Agriinsight – AGRIinsight are map geeks and software boffins who are pulling together aggregated data maps from agro businesses in sub-Saharan Africa. Creating an information platform, the Company is making data visual for better decision making in food security, farming economics and environmental factors. Those are inarguably good things to do.

Meanwhile, in the main hall, two further Serious Impact ventures were taking part in the Fast and Furious Pitch Off. Biotechspert & Hinton Bikes are both members of the Cambridge Serious Impact incubator, and made the finals of the Pitchfest competition, competing against six others to claim the final prize.

A bean-bag session was also lead by Serious Impact venture, CB Partners, covering “How to build your dream team”. The session was aimed at early stage companies growing and building their first team.